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Food: A Cultural
Culinary History

Course Guidebook

Professor Ken Albala

University of the Pacific

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Ken Albala, Ph.D.
Professor of History
University of the Pacific

Professor Ken Albala is Professor of History
at the University of the Pacific in Stockton,
California, where he has been teaching food
history and the history of early modern Europe for
the past 20 years. In 2009, he won the Faye and
Alex G. Spanos Distinguished Teaching Award
at the University of the Pacific. He is also a Visiting Professor at Boston
University, where he teaches an advanced food history course in the
gastronomy program. He has a B.A. in European Studies from The George
Washington University, an M.A. in History from Yale University, and a
Ph.D. in History from Columbia University.

Professor Albala is the author or editor of 16 books on food, including Eating
Right in the Renaissance; Food in Early Modern Europe; Cooking in Europe,
1250–1650; The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance
Europe; Beans: A History (winner of the 2008 International Association of
Culinary Professionals Jane Grigson Award); and Pancake: A Global History.
He also has coedited The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food and
Drink Industries, Human Cuisine, and two other collections: Food and Faith
in Christian Culture and A Cultural History of Food in the Renaissance.

Professor Albala was editor of three food series for Greenwood Press
with 30 volumes in print, and his four-volume Food Cultures of the World
Encyclopedia was published in 2011. He is also coeditor of the journal Food,
Culture & Society and general editor of the series AltaMira Studies in Food
and Gastronomy, for which he has written a textbook entitled Three World
Cuisines: Italian, Mexican, Chinese, which won the 2013 Gourmand World
Cookbook Award for Best Foreign Cuisine Book in the World.

Professor Albala is currently researching a history of theological
controversies surrounding fasting in the Reformation era. Recently, he

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coauthored a cookbook, The Lost Art of Real Cooking, and its sequel, The
Lost Arts of Hearth and Home, a handbook of kitchen and home projects. ■

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Professor Biography ............................................................................i
Course Scope.....................................................................................1

LECTURE GUIDES

LECTURE 1
Hunting, Gathering, and Stone Age Cooking......................................4
LECTURE 2
What Early Agriculturalists Ate..........................................................12
LECTURE 3
Egypt and the Gift of the Nile............................................................20
LECTURE 4
Ancient Judea—From Eden to Kosher Laws....................................28
LECTURE 5
Classical Greece—Wine, Olive Oil, and Trade.................................36
LECTURE 6
The Alexandrian Exchange and the Four Humors............................43
LECTURE 7
Ancient India—Sacred Cows and Ayurveda.....................................50
LECTURE 8
Yin and Yang of Classical Chinese Cuisine......................................57
LECTURE 9
Dining in Republican and Imperial Rome .........................................65
LECTURE 10
Early Christianity—Food Rituals and Asceticism..............................72

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Table of Contents

LECTURE 11
Europe’s Dark Ages and Charlemagne ............................................78

LECTURE 12
Islam—A Thousand and One Nights of Cooking ..............................85

LECTURE 13
Carnival in the High Middle Ages......................................................92

LECTURE 14
International Gothic Cuisine .............................................................99

LECTURE 15
A Renaissance in the Kitchen.........................................................106

LECTURE 16
Aztecs and the Roots of Mexican Cooking..................................... 113

LECTURE 17
1492—Globalization and Fusion Cuisines......................................120

LECTURE 18
16th-Century Manners and Reformation Diets ................................127

LECTURE 19
Papal Rome and the Spanish Golden Age .....................................134

LECTURE 20
The Birth of French Haute Cuisine .................................................143

LECTURE 21
Elizabethan England, Puritans, Country Food................................150

LECTURE 22
Dutch Treat—Coffee, Tea, Sugar, Tobacco ....................................158

LECTURE 23
African and Aboriginal Cuisines......................................................165

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Table of Contents

LECTURE 24
Edo, Japan—Samurai Dining and Zen Aesthetics..........................172

LECTURE 25
Colonial Cookery in North America.................................................178

LECTURE 26
Eating in the Early Industrial Revolution.........................................185

LECTURE 27
Romantics, Vegetarians, Utopians .................................................192

LECTURE 28
First Restaurants, Chefs, and Gastronomy ....................................199

LECTURE 29
Big Business and the Homogenization of Food..............................206

LECTURE 30
Food Imperialism around the World ...............................................213

LECTURE 31
Immigrant Cuisines and Ethnic Restaurants ..................................220

LECTURE 32
War, Nutritionism, and the Great Depression .................................227

LECTURE 33
World War II and the Advent of Fast Food......................................234

LECTURE 34
Counterculture—From Hippies to Foodies .....................................241

LECTURE 35
Science of New Dishes and New Organisms .................................248

LECTURE 36
The Past as Prologue? ...................................................................255

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Table of Contents

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
Bibliography....................................................................................261

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Food: A Cultural Culinary History

Scope:

This course explores the history of how humans have produced,
cooked, and consumed food—from the earliest hunting-and-gathering
societies to the present. This course examines how civilizations and
their foodways have been shaped by geography, native flora and fauna, and
technological innovations. Feeding people has always been the primary
concern of our species, and more than any other factor, finding, growing, and
trading food products has been the prime catalyst in human history. Think,
for example, how the desire for spices in the Middle Ages led directly to the
discovery of the New World.

The scope of this course is global, covering civilizations of Asia, America,
Africa, and Europe and how cultures in each of these continents domesticated
unique staples that literally enabled these civilizations to expand and flourish.
The course also covers marginalized and colonized cultures that were
dominated largely to feed or entice the palates of the great. A major theme
of the course is the process of globalization, imperialism, and the growth of
capitalist enterprise at the cost of indigenous cultures and traditional farming
practices and how these processes were shaped by trade in food.

Beyond the larger economic and social issues, the course will also cover the
culture of food, why humans made the food choices they have, and what
their food practices tell us about them and their world. In other words, food
practices will be used as a window for viewing culture as a whole—just as
one might study painting or literature. Foodways reveal much more because
not only must all humans eat, but they also all make conscious choices about
food within a cultural milieu. These choices not only reveal who they are
and where they fit in socially, but also often their political, religious, and
philosophical bend. By exploring what humans have thought and written
about food, you will hopefully be able to experience human history as it
becomes alive and direct in a way that the stories of great kings and epic
battles sometimes cannot.

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Scope This course will examine in detail cookbooks, culinary literature, and dietary
and religious texts—all of which reveal the preoccupations and predilections
of the past. The course will also examine why different people make different
food choices, why they sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to find rare or
exotic items while refusing to eat foods that are cheap and plentiful, why
individuals from certain social classes will avoid or esteem particular foods,
and in general how food is the most important factor of self-definition. In
other words, food helps define who the individual is; where he or she fits
in society; and how the culture, nationality, or ethnicity he or she espouses
expresses itself through food and cuisine. Of course, what a particular food
or dish may mean differs dramatically from place to place and time to time,
from generation to generation, and even in the mind of one individual
depending on the context. This course will help you see not only how and
why other cultures shape what people eat, but also how your choices are
ultimately determined by our culture and are often equally bizarre and
arbitrary to outsiders, especially when it comes to food taboos.

Because this is a history course, it will examine the way that the interaction,
destruction, transformation, and assimilation of cultures are all hastened by
the human drive to feed and titillate the gullet. For example, the demand
for sugar and spices in the late Middle Ages was not only the impetus for
discovering the New World, but it also transformed the economy of both
the Old World and the New World and involved massive migrations, the
spread of human pathogens, and the biological interaction of flora, fauna,
and humans among several continents. All of this changed the world—so
that Europeans could have sugar in their tea.

The entire course is also accompanied by hands-on activities so that you
can not only read about food in the past in the lecture guides, but you can
also have some fun in the kitchen exploring the past and even tasting it if
you so desire. The activities are designed to bring the lectures alive—not
only by having you experience the physical act of cooking as it was done in
the past, but also by having you understand directly the taste preferences of
our forebears. Of course, using equipment that would have been used in the
past helps you get much closer, as does using exactly the ingredients they
would have used, but there is no reason not to try these activities in your
modern kitchen as well. Some of these activities involve recipes that were

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taken directly from historic cookbooks. Reconstructions are given when
recipes were not available or have never been translated. Others are simply
culinary exercises or tastings. They are all designed to expand your palate, to
explore the past—just as you might a new, exotic cuisine you have recently
discovered. All recipes have either been adapted from the original or are
direct translations from the original languages. ■

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Lecture 1: Hunting, Gathering, and Stone Age Cooking Hunting, Gathering, and Stone Age Cooking

Lecture 1

Throughout this course, you will analyze what people ate and why, how
they made the best of their material resources, which technologies
they used to transform food, and most importantly, what ideas they
had about food. By the end of the course, your relationship to the food
you eat—and to human history as a whole—may be quite different and,
hopefully, far richer. This lecture begins at the very beginning, even before
human history, with a discussion of food in prehistoric times.

Prehistoric Diets
 Looking at the diet of prehistoric people raises fundamental
questions about what we were meant to eat according to nature. This
is a question that most civilizations at one point or another address:
Are we primarily sharp-toothed carnivores or benign vegetarians?

 It had long been assumed that our prehistoric forebears were
primarily hunters, judging from archaeological remains of animal
bones and arrow tips and pictures of game depicted on cave walls.
However, from the emergence of Homo sapiens about 200,000
years ago to only about 10,000 years ago—the vast majority
of our time on this planet—humans got their food by gathering
and hunting.

 Humans are omnivores—and always have been. Sophisticated
methods of analyzing tissue remains and fossilized bits of food
are now giving us a more complete image of the prehistoric diet,
and the surprise is that prehistoric humans were well fed; they ate
everything and anything that offered nutritional value, including
meat of animals large and small, insects, fish, wild greens, nuts,
berries, and seeds.

 Other evidence is provided by plant and animal remains left at
archaeological sites, including bits of bones, heaps of shells, and

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traces of bug exoskeletons. When you find a huge pile of bones
of a particular species that are burned, broken, and discarded in a
heap, it’s good evidence that it was a regular part of the diet and
that hunters brought back their kill to a central place to butcher it
and probably shared it communally.

 Wall paintings, such as those in Lascaux in France and Altamira
in Spain, reveal which species were hunted—some of which are
now extinct, including woolly mammoths, or no longer live in the
region because they were overhunted, or the climate changed so
dramatically that they couldn’t survive or feed themselves.

 Anthropologists also infer information about prehistoric diets and
cooking methods by comparing modern-day peoples still living
in traditional ways, including Amazonian tribes and aboriginal
Australians, and drawing inferences about prehistoric peoples
from them.

Human Evolution
 There have been a lot of recent discoveries in paleontology
regarding human evolution. The story of how we became human
is all about food: hunting, processing ingredients, and cooking.
The story of human evolution itself is largely a story of changes
triggered by different modes of food processing.

 The last common ancestor of humans and apes seems to have lived
between 5 and 10 million years ago. Both were omnivores, but a
parting of the ways in the quest for food, in a sense, made us what
we are. Ardipithecus ramidus, discovered in 1994, is the oldest
hominid. Ardipithecus ramidus lived about 5 million years ago, was
about four feet tall, walked upright, and lived in forests.

 Bipedalism, the fact that hominids walk on two feet, is thought
to be the result of the need to move faster and see farther when
hominids began to move onto the plains and catch larger animals or
escape from predators. In other words, how we ate (on the plains)
directly drove evolution. Shorter hominids that walked with their

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knuckles on the ground couldn’t compete and, therefore, died off.
Meanwhile, apes stayed in forests.

 The first cultural changes related to food appeared about 2.5 to
1.5 million years ago with Homo habilis, or “handy man.” He was
found with tools around him, such as flaked stones for cutting.
Homo habilis had a bigger brain, and the Broca’s area of the brain
was larger, so he probably could speak a bit, too.

 Homo habilis probably made the transition from a diet comprised
primarily of unprocessed plant foods to a greater amount of meat in
the Pleistocene era, about 1.5 million years ago. Meat was acquired
just as often by scavenging
as hunting.

 Homo erectus lived from 1.8
million to 300,000 years ago
and is found outside Africa and
in Europe. Homo erectus were
probably better walkers than
we are; our pelvises are much
wider to allow for the birth of
infants with big brains. About
700,000 years ago, there’s
direct evidence of hunting.
Most importantly, Homo
erectus probably used fire.

 Recently, Richard Wrangham
has made the argument that Homo erectus is perhaps an
Homo erectus also cooked food, ancestor of modern humans.
and this made available many
more nutrients, which allowed us to spend less energy digesting
raw food and more energy developing greater brain capacity. In
other words, we evolved because we cooked food.

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Lecture 1: Hunting, Gathering, and Stone Age Cooking
© Dorling Kindersley RF/Thinkstock.

 Archaic forms of Homo sapiens first appeared about 500,000 years
ago. For example, Neanderthals lived from 320,000 to 30,000 years
ago. They are closely related to us—so close that we could produce
offspring with them.

 The brains of Neanderthals were a little bigger than ours. They were
stout but short (about 5’ 6’’) with a solid build, and they adapted
to living in colder climate of the last major ice age. They used a
wide variety of tools and weapons. They were hunters of big game,
and most importantly, Neanderthals cooked their food—from about
250,000 years ago—and show the oldest undeniable evidence of
widespread cooking of food, which is about 125,000 years old.

 Homo sapiens sapiens only appeared 120,000 years ago; we lived
at the same time as Neanderthals. About 40,000 years ago, Cro-
Magnon man was making tools for sewing clothes, sculpting,
decorating beads and ivory carvings, clay figures, instruments, and
cave paintings. It’s only here that there’s evidence of sophisticated
hunting strategies. They also took on dangerous animals, such as
wild boar and woolly mammoths.

 When we get to 30,000 B.C., or the Paleolithic Period (Old
Stone Age), we are the only hominid left. Presumably, our
advanced organizational skills gave us a distinct advantage over
the Neanderthals, and it may have been partly the advantage of
sophisticated cooking and socializing.

Hunting-Gathering Life
 Ninety percent of humans who have ever lived were gatherers
and hunters. Although hunter-gatherers were more closely tied to
the larger ecosystem along with other animals, it would be wrong
to assume that they lived in some kind of primeval harmony with
nature. They destroyed fields through burning, hunted animals to
extinction, and caused pollution.

 Given the extremely low population density, however, they didn’t
do that much damage. About a million years ago, there were about

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Lecture 1: Hunting, Gathering, and Stone Age Cooking half a million hominids in existence; by 30,000 years ago, there
were about three million. Despite the smaller populations, hunter-
gatherers were on the whole better nourished, had fewer diseases,
and probably had a lot more spare time than their agricultural-
pastoral descendants.

 Regarding free time, a hunting-gathering economy provides about
10,000 to 15,000 calories per hour of labor. Subsistence farmers,
growing mostly grain, get between 3,000 and 5,000. You have to
work much harder when farming—and you have to eat a lot more
vegetables to be properly nourished.

 To capture or kill an animal requires a high level of sophistication.
Making such tools as bows and arrows are skills that are passed
down from generation to generation. Presumably, these skills give
some peoples an evolutionary advantage over others, and this
may be why we replaced Neanderthals. Sophisticated toolmakers
survive and pass on their genes at a greater rate.

 It is generally believed that there was a gender-specific division
of labor among these people—as there often is among nomadic
hunter-gatherers today. Men went out to hunt while women did the
gathering because they were also involved with child rearing.

 Cooking was essential to our becoming human and was the first
major food revolution. Cooking involves the development of
ritual, and a more complex social organization results from regular
cooking with fire. Many foods, including meat, starches, and wild
grasses, were made more digestible (or digestible for the first time)
with the advent of cooking with fire. Cooking also kills pathogens
in food, so those who cooked survived at greater rates than those
who didn’t—a real evolutionary advantage over all other animals.

 In fact, even before pottery and metallurgy, a core repertoire of
cooking methods had already come into use.
○ Roasting.

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○ Using a hot stone as a griddle.

○ Filling a pit with stones and covering it with leaves and earth.

○ Filling a basket with water and hot stones.

○ Stretching skin with water over a fire.

○ Filling a stone-lined pit (below the water table) with water and
hot rocks or smeared with clay and fired.

○ Stuffing entrails with other foods.

○ Placing food on a wooden rack over hot coals in a pit (barbequing).

 What was eaten depends entirely on the region, but there are some
generalizations that can be made. The first major distinction is
between those living near water and those inland in open grasslands,
where there are animals in herds. The inland people generally have
to move farther and more frequently than the coastal people.

 Another generalization is that colder arctic and more northern
regions tend to have a narrower diet, like Eskimos on seals and fish.
In more tropical regions, the diet is much more varied with a greater
mix of vegetables, fruits, and meats.

 Bigger jaws holding bigger muscles suggest rougher and rawer
food; smaller jaws of more recent humans suggest softer and
cooked food. There are more cavities, too, with the agriculturalist’s
diet of starches and sugars. Hunter-gatherers have more worn front
teeth and canines; agriculturalists’ molars wear down more quickly.

 For more than 100,000 years, virtually everything humans ate was
wild. The animal species they ate were leaner, and the roots and
vegetables were stronger tasting, with all the fiber and roughage
intact. They also ate a lot of nuts and berries, which many people
today claim are very good for your health.

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Lecture 1: Hunting, Gathering, and Stone Age Cooking Suggested Reading

Anderson, Everyone Eats.

Fraser, Empires of Food.

Higman, How Food Made History.

Jones, Feast.

Montanari, Food Is Culture.

Wrangham, Catching Fire.

Culinary Activity

Boiling Water in a Paper Bag
Here’s an interesting exercise that simply shows how one can cook in an
animal skin. Take a large paper shopping bag, and cut out an eight-by-eight-
inch square with no seams. (Seams would cause it to leak.) Fold it in half
diagonally once into a triangle, and then fold it again in half into a smaller
triangle. Open it up so that you have a cone, and tape or staple the ends so
that it doesn’t unfold. Notice that one side will be thicker than the other;
that’s fine, it will hold water. Next, fill the cone halfway up with water, and
place it immediately over a burning candle. In a few minutes, the water
inside will boil, and the paper will not burn. This replicates the technique of
cooking in an open skin stretched over a fire. If you have the patience, try
cooking a carrot in the boiling water.

Pit Cooking
To get a sense of how people cooked in prehistoric times, first find an open
spot with soil soft enough to dig, at least 20 feet from any trees or buildings.
Dig a circular hole about three feet deep. Line the perimeter of the pit with
large stones for safety purposes and so that you can balance sticks across the
pit. Make a fire inside the pit, starting with small kindling and building up
to larger logs. When they have burned down to coals, you can start cooking.
This is the original way to barbecue, incidentally.

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You want to cook long and slow, but because this is before the discovery of
metallurgy, you need to make a lattice using fresh green sticks. Lay them
across the pit in one direction, and then lay more in the other direction so that
you have a kind of primitive grill. They should be far enough away from the
hot coals so that they don’t burn, but they probably will char a little. Place on
top of the sticks any meat you prefer: a few split chickens, large cuts of pork
shoulder, or even a fish wrapped in sturdy leaves. Your seasoning should be
minimal—whatever herbs you can find and salt. Because you are using a
very gentle fire, expect larger pieces of meat to cook for at least an hour or
so. If you have a flare-up, you can always sprinkle a little water on the fire to
prevent the meat from burning. It will smoke a lot, which is good. Smoke is
unquestionably a major flavor category that we have learned to enjoy in the
millennia of cooking in this way.

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Lecture 2: What Early Agriculturalists Ate What Early Agriculturalists Ate

Lecture 2

The agricultural revolution is probably the single most important event
in human history. In fact, there were several agricultural revolutions
at different times around the globe, and it was not one event, but a
long and gradual process wherein people made the shift from the nomadic
hunting-gathering way of life to the sedentary agricultural—and civilized—
way of life. In this lecture, you will learn how ancient peoples figured out a
way to support their growing population by moving toward an agricultural-
based society.

The Beginning of the Agricultural Revolution
 Late-18th-century philosopher and economist Thomas Malthus
believed that like all animals, human populations are subject to the
availability of resources. A population can only grow as fast as the
resources can feed the new mouths. If it gets too large, many will
naturally die off, and if resources are abundant, then the population
will naturally grow faster.

 In prehistoric times, even if a new technology like agriculture is
invented, the population will rise dramatically but still be limited
by whatever that new technology can produce. Malthus noted that
agriculture can only be increased arithmetically while population
increases exponentially.

 Even if population pressure forced some people to find new ways
of getting food, it did not free them from the recurrent crises,
food shortages, and famines. In fact, in certain respects, it made
those worse because they were now depending on far fewer
plants: If a crop failure ruined one single species, there could be
a major devastating famine whereas before, no one species was
depended on, so if one thing was missing, they gathered or hunted
something else.

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 Apart from population pressure being a possible catalyst, resources
they had been depending on suddenly become scarce. This is
probably the initial catalyst. It may seem odd, but in those hunting
and gathering days, the Earth was also in the tail end of the last
major ice age, which meant that humans were relatively confined to
the warmer parts of the Earth and closer to the tropics, but so were
the animals they hunted and the plants they depended on.

 When the Earth began to get warmer—from about 60 degrees
in summer to about 80 or more—there was more food and more
fields. What used to be great frozen glaciers became lush prairies.
The animal populations were no longer contained. Because the
vegetation grew more easily, the gathering was much better for
humans, too, so their populations also grow.

 However, suddenly, they are out of balance. Hunting is harder, and
gathering is easier. More mouths to feed means greater pressure
to increase yield. Historians guess that plants were domesticated,
which means to actively change a species to accentuate certain
desired traits until that species no longer resembles the plant that
grew in the wild.

 Dogs were probably the first animals to be domesticated, by
accident, following around human camps for scraps and providing
some watch from other predators. Not only can these animals
be trained to stay in herds, but they also are ruminants, which is
important because they can be fed grass (which humans can’t eat)
instead of other animals.

The Spread of the Agricultural Revolution
 About 10,000 years ago, the first place the agricultural revolution hit
was the region called the Fertile Crescent, an arc covering what is
today Iraq, Syria, eastern Turkey, Lebanon, and Israel. This region
just happened to luck out by having a lot of easily domesticated
plants and animals, including goats, sheep, and cows, which offer
meat, wool, hides, milk, and cheese. These types of animals provide
insurance, traction, transport, and manure (fertilizer).

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Lecture 2: What Early Agriculturalists Ate
© Design Pics/Thinkstock.
Wheat, one of the most important cereal crops, can be grown in a wide variety of
climates and soils.

 In addition, there is the wild ancestor of wheat all over the Fertile
Crescent. Einkorn, spelt, and emmer have a relatively high protein
content, so they can become staple crops. They contain about 8
to 14 percent protein, not nearly as much as meat, but people can
live on it as the base of their diet. It can also be stored. Without
wheat, civilization as we know it would never have developed in
the Fertile Crescent—or, for that matter, anywhere.

 Rice in Asia, corn in Mesoamerica, potatoes and quinoa in South
America, sorghum in Africa, and teff in Ethiopia were all staple
starches that allowed the population to grow and caused a need for
further organizational rigor. Where there was no such staple, the
population invariably remained small, limited by what could be
gathered, and more advanced civilizations never appeared.

 In the many places where agriculture never arose in ancient times—
including Australia, the Amazon, and the Kalahari desert—it was
not that these people were somehow less intelligent or savages,

14

but rather, they either did not need agriculture or there just weren’t
the right plants and animals that could be domesticated. Usually,
they were cut off from outside influences, so those plants couldn’t
be introduced.

 By 7000 B.C., agriculture had reached Greece. By 6000 B.C., it
had reached Italy, eastern Spain, and central Germany, and by 5000
B.C., it had reached southern Britain. Some crops, such as olives,
couldn’t make it, but wheat definitely did. A north-south axis makes
transmission much more difficult—such as from North America to
South America—because there are too many climate zones to cross.

 Growing plants and keeping animals not only led to a more
sedentary life, but also to agriculture, settled villages, or towns,
ultimately leading to civilization. More people living close together
led to more agreed ways of doing things, including formal laws.
It also led to trade, and where there’s trade, there’s some need to
regulate it.

 This leads to rulers and the development of a social structure,
including classes. Then, soldiers emerge to keep the rulers in power,
collect taxes, protect the group from outside threats, or seize booty
or even territory from neighbors. In this case, it’s an advantage to
have a big population so that you have more soldiers to conquer
your neighbors.

 Then, priests enter the picture to legitimate the ruler, create rituals
to appease the God, and support the priestly class. Rituals serve
to define behavior by socializing members of the group, bringing
them under the authority of those in power and creating cohesion
among the group. Priests also tend to be the ones who develop
writing systems to keep religious texts and dogma, and they record
official laws for the state. In most of the early states, priests also act
as bureaucrats.

 Once an upper class is established, a specialized profession of
people (artists) provides luxury goods, adorning palaces, temples,

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Lecture 2: What Early Agriculturalists Ate and cooking for the elite. This is the first time that there was
anything like a professional chef.

 At this point, the population really explodes. A more steady, even
if less nutritious, diet means less amenorrhea for women of child-
bearing age and more babies surviving infancy. In addition, there’s
great incentive to have larger families because that means more
hands to grow food.

 Large populations with lots of cool stuff to steal leads to war,
which involves much bigger engagements, rather than small-time
raids, and chance encounters of nomadic peoples. Agricultural and
pastoral people—and even more so, the civilized—have a secret
weapon that gives them an advantage over others: disease.

 A disease that is very nasty when it first arrives gradually
becomes less virulent in a population that has lived with it for
many generations. This means that when civilized peoples with
long contact with the disease meet the comparatively uncivilized
and isolated (hunter-gatherers), they wipe them out—sometimes
completely, because they have had no previous contact.

What Did the First Civilizations Eat?
 The first civilizations ate wheat and its relatives; barley, chickpeas,
and lentils all provided the staple base. Such foods are relatively
high in protein but are composed mostly of starch, and you have
to eat more of it just to stay fuelled. The first civilizations also ate
cabbages, lettuces, and a small amount of animal protein from goats,
sheep, cows, and pigs, which were all eventually domesticated.

 Dairy products were almost totally new in the human diet. It is
pretty certain that human beings did not evolve an ability to digest
milk past infancy because in many places that don’t regularly drink
milk, there is still lactose intolerance, which is the inability to break
down lactose in milk. Only in places where they have depended
on milk for many centuries does this intolerance become less
pronounced.

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 Cheese is a product of bacteria, and next to the few new domesticated
species, the most important new foods invented by the earliest
civilizations are the product of things going bad—or, rather, being
colonized by benign bacteria. By controlling the conditions under
which the good bacteria proliferate, civilized humans invented a
whole series of new foods, including bread, wine and beer, cheese,
and pickled or cured vegetables and fruits.

 The ability to store large quantities of food has an important effect:
You don’t have to eat everything you can and move on, as hunters
and gatherers did. All these things can be kept from season to season
and stored long term in case of crop failure, drought, or invasion.
Although they may have a less varied diet, it’s a more regular and
predictable diet.

 Another consequence of food storage is that much more land
is going to have to be altered to grow crops. Even in the best
of situations, the same crops grown over and over caused soil
depletion, prompting people to move elsewhere—usually to invade
their neighbors.

 Fats—especially olive oil and nut oils—are an important class of
foods that altered society. Not only do these provide a storable
source of extra calories, but also a new cooking medium: frying
and sautéing.

 Wild fowl were eaten for millennia, but domesticating chickens
as well as ducks and geese is very important. This led to a ready
supply of eggs at a relatively small cost, and you could eat the fowl
when it was done producing eggs.

 Fish remained primarily caught wild until modern times, but
shellfish farming hasn’t changed much since ancient times. It’s not
exactly domestication, but it is a very efficient way of farming.

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Lecture 2: What Early Agriculturalists Ate Suggested Reading

Bottéro, The Oldest Cuisine in the World.

Brothwell, Food in Antiquity.

McGovern, Uncorking the Past.

Culinary Activity

Making Neolithic Flatbread
This is a simple flatbread such as would have been eaten before ovens came
into common use. It is something like pita bread, but chewier and with a
lot more flavor. If you can find freshly ground whole wheat, or even grind
it yourself, all the better. Any whole wheat flour will work well. Begin
by fermenting half of a cup of the flour by mixing it with water until a
thick batter is formed. Leave this out on the counter, uncovered. The next
morning, add another half of a cup each of flour and water. Continue every
morning for about one week, at which time the mixture will be bubbling and
smell sour. You have just captured and nurtured wild yeast and lactobacilli.
Remove half of this starter to another bowl, and add another cup of water
and enough flour—and a good pinch of salt—to make a stiff dough. Knead
this well, and set aside for several hours until risen. This will happen quickly
in the summer and slowly in the winter. Keep the rest of the starter to make
another batch or for risen bread.

Divide the dough into fist-sized balls, and pat out into flat rounds with your
hands. Stretch each one until thin, but not so thin that they break. If you have
an outdoor fire, these can be cooked on a flat stone set over hot coals, but
indoors is just as good. Heat a pan, and simply throw in one flatbread. Count
to 30, and turn over. Count to 30 again, and then move the bread directly to an
open burner (assuming that you have a gas stove) or a barbecue. With tongs,
flip repeatedly until lightly charred on each side. Then, put into a covered
plate or casserole and continue with the rest of the flatbreads. They will stay
warm for a long time. Serve with a dip like hummus or baba ganoush, made
of charred eggplant. These are also the Neolithic ancestors of pizza and can
be topped with a fresh cheese to wonderful effect.

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Akkadian Recipe
Three surviving cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia constitute the
earliest recorded recipes on Earth. They are quite cryptic, largely because
the ingredients have not all been identified. The following recipe is an
adaptation of the original recipe that fills in the procedural details. It gives an
approximation of what cooking would have been like 35 centuries ago. The
meat, which is domestic lamb, probably indicates that this is a dish for the
wealthy—or perhaps intended for a special occasion. Beer was the common
drink of all classes and was used widely in cooking as well. Consider how all
of these ingredients would have been comparatively uncommon before the
advent of agriculture.

Tuh’u Beet Broth
(adapted from Jean Bottéro’s The Oldest Cuisine in the World, p. 28)
Start with one pound of lamb shoulder cut into walnut-sized chunks or lamb
stew meat. Remove any visible fat, and dice finely. Fill a medium pot halfway
with water, and add the fat and the lamb. Add a teaspoon of salt; 12 ounces
of beer; a finely chopped onion; a handful of arugula, finely chopped; ground
coriander seed; and ground cumin. Bring the pot to a boil, and simmer for
about one hour. Add in three peeled and quartered beets. Then, make a paste
of one clove of garlic and the white part of one leek by pounding them in
a mortar or reducing them to a fine paste in a food processor. Add to the
pot. Let simmer until the beets are tender, about 30 minutes longer. Sprinkle
the soup with chopped fresh coriander before serving. Notice how all of the
ingredients would have been cultivated, though other dishes that use wild
game and birds were also recorded on these tablets. Also notice how similar
this dish is to Middle Eastern cooking today.

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Lecture 3: Egypt and the Gift of the Nile Egypt and the Gift of the Nile

Lecture 3

The first proper civilization is generally referred to as Sumer, which
encompassed a few dozen cities, including Lagash, Umma, Uruk,
and Ur—all of which are in modern-day Iraq. These people practiced
year-round agriculture, created complex irrigation systems, and practiced
monoculture, which involves growing single crops intensively. The first
recorded recipes were found in these cities, which began to flourish around
4000 to 3500 B.C. In this lecture, you will learn that a civilization blessed with
great fertility and natural boundaries, combined with court patronage from
the top, is bound to develop a complex cuisine that will last for millennia.

Ancient Egypt
 Egypt is the first place to have a fully developed, socially stratified
civilization outside the Fertile Crescent. The agricultural revolution
was imported there, and it’s the first place that we have full
documentary as well as archaeological evidence of agriculture,
domestication, cuisine, and medicine.

 There is evidence of extensive writings as well as paintings of
foodstuffs; therefore, we can talk about the history of food there.
We also have tons of physical evidence courtesy of the hundreds
of preserved Egyptians—mummies—with whom there was often
entombed jars of food.

 Egypt was ruled almost continuously by the same people from
about 3100 B.C. to about 525 B.C., when the Persians and then the
Greeks came in. Egypt has a very long and stable history of about
2.5 millennia—perhaps the longest continual civilization on Earth,
with the exception of China.

 Egypt had long stretches of peaceful and prosperous dynasties,
unlike Sumerians, whose cities were constantly fighting among
themselves. Egypt, in contrast, is a big stable empire with a well-

20

© iStockphoto/Thinkstock.

Food and wine priestesses are often depicted in ancient Egyptian wall paintings.

developed court culture surrounding the pharaoh, which means
highly developed artistic traditions, including the culinary arts,
although there are no actual recipes from pharaonic times.

 The geography of Egypt makes a nice contrast to Mesopotamia.
The Tigris and Euphrates are unpredictable rivers. Water was
channeled and used to irrigate Sumer, but after many centuries, the
soil became increasingly salinized, which made the land less fertile
over the years and eventually caused the whole civilization to fall
apart—the first ecological disaster in human history.

 In contrast, the Nile floods very predictably each year from upper
to lower Egypt and into the delta, bringing tons of silt and rich soil
with it, which means that Egypt remains extremely fertile along the
flood plain.

 Egyptians didn’t have a standing army for most of their history,
partly because of their extremely rigid and hierarchical social

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Lecture 3: Egypt and the Gift of the Nile structure with the pharaoh as not only an absolute ruler, but also
as a semidivine being descended from the gods. This is the first
culture in which there is a distinct elite cuisine as well as an explicit
nutritional theory.

 Egypt had extensive trade networks, but none of the things they
imported were necessities. Egypt was pretty much self-sufficient;
they only imported luxury items, primarily for the wealthy
to consume.

 Most Egyptologists agree that all Egyptians were relatively well
fed. The only direct evidence of malnutrition comes from frequent
reference to intestinal worms and schistosomiasis, which prevents
absorption of nutrients. There is even forensic evidence among
mummies that many people overate, and there is some evidence
of alcoholism.

 Egyptians loved animals. They kept them as pets, mummified them,
worshipped them as gods, used them as symbols in their writing
system, and loved to eat them. Animals were often sacrificed to the
gods as well, which is a little confusing because it seems that if an
animal was sacred to a god, sometimes it had to be protected, and
other times, it had to be sacrificed to that god.

 The Egyptians didn’t have any rigid food prohibitions set down in a
law like the Hebrews or Hindus, but for many kinds of people, such
as priests or members of a specific cult to a particular deity, certain
foods might be prohibited. However, these were rarely universal or
unchanging over time.

The Egyptian Diet
 Every visitor in classical times remarked how fertile Egypt was
and how much grain they had. The state stored massive amounts
of grain to prevent famine in lean years, as in the story of Joseph.
They often imported grain from Syria or demanded it in tribute
from subject states. The state usually distributed this grain as a
kind of welfare system administered by the priests, who perhaps

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first offered it to the gods and then redistributed it. There is also
evidence that grain could be used for taxation purposes.

 Barley also figured prominently in Egyptian myths about
resurrection. Because the plant dies and the seed goes dormant and
then sprouts up into a new plant, it was a kind of symbol of the
afterlife, and mummies were often buried with barley necklaces.

 The Egyptians ate many different kinds of bread. It was made from
barley or spelt for the lower classes and more finely ground and
bolted wheat for the upper classes. They also leavened their bread
with yeast. Many different kinds of breads have been found buried
with the dead to feed them in the afterlife. Bread was the staple
food for Egyptians.

 The Egyptians ate a lot of wild game—including ibex, gazelle,
and antelopes—and hunting was a favorite pastime. Above all,
the Egyptians loved beef. Large-scale cattle industry developed
in the north, where there are broad, flat plains. Although there are
numerous illustrations of butcher’s shops and cut-up pieces of
beef, we don’t really know how they cooked it, although we might
assume that they boiled it.

 We know that the Egyptians kept dairy cows because there are
frequent depictions of milkmaids. Priests also kept sacred bulls,
which had special marks that denoted that they were incarnations
of the god Apis. The Egyptians also used beef by-products in
many medicines.

 Egyptians definitely kept pigs in an earlier period of time, but
like the Hebrews, they seem to have avoided it later. There is no
evidence of an explicit taboo, but there are practically no remains or
depictions of pigs, and they were forbidden to be used as sacrifices.

 Sheep and goats were also domesticated. They were introduced from
Asia along with ibex—a kind of Nubian mountain goat—which is

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Lecture 3: Egypt and the Gift of the Nile Amursanu-Pigeon Broth

Most Sumerian recipes were simple in preparation but quite
complex in the range of ingredients. For example, a broth
would be made by adding a piece of meat to a pot with
water, fat, salt, flavorings—such as onion, cumin, coriander, and
leeks—and sometimes bread crumbs for thickness, or even blood.

Split the pigeon in two; other meat is also used. Prepare water and
add fat, salt to taste, bread crumbs, onion, samidu, leek, and garlic.
Before using, soak these herbs in milk. It is ready to serve.

African. Sheep were mostly kept for wool, which priests weren’t
allowed to wear, and wealthy people seem to have avoided it.

 Egyptians loved fowl, including geese, ducks, cranes, pigeons, and
quails. All were hieroglyphic symbols, and all were also worshipped.
Egyptians didn’t eat falcons, but they used them for capturing other
birds as an elite sport. They also hunted bigger birds with a bow
and arrow. Waterfowl that were used for food were usually wild and
caught using big nets. Ducks and geese were captured and fattened
in pens but were not technically domesticated.

 Fowl were also used for temple offerings. In fact, cooked geese
were often included in funerary offerings and buried with the
deceased. Ibis were also sacred. They were associated with
Thoth and were forbidden as food; they’re extinct now in Egypt.
Falcons and vultures were also associated with specific gods that
were forbidden. Domestic chickens don’t seem to appear until
very late and were probably not used regularly until Ptolemaic or
Roman times.

 Egyptians loved fish. They fished for sport with spears, with a hook
and line, or commercially with nets and traps. It is very difficult

24

to precisely identify the species that they ate from Egyptian words
or paintings, and there aren’t remains as with other animals. They
did have elaborate ways of preparing and preserving fish, which are
obviously very perishable. There are depictions of fish, presumably
dried and salted, being carried in baskets or being stacked for
sale. Egyptians also ate salted dried fish roe. They sometimes ate
crocodile, but this was also a sacred animal.

 Like wheat, grapes were introduced into Egypt, and vineyards
were owned only by the wealthiest people. Frequently, harvesting
scenes were painted on tombs. Egyptians became connoisseurs
of wine, too. Wine jars were buried in tombs, such as King Tut’s,
and sometimes the jars contained information like the estate,
winemaker, and year of vintage. There is pretty good evidence that
there was a luxury trade in wine—or at least that pharaohs could
expect to drink the best wine in the afterlife.

 The milky sap of older varieties of lettuce was suggestive of semen
to the Egyptians, which is why they used it as a fertility offering to
the gods. They also had celery, cabbage, gourds, and cucumbers.

 The only beans that the Egyptians could’ve had were fava beans,
black-eyed peas, or chickpeas. They also had lentils and vetches.
Priests were supposed to avoid beans. Beans were as important then
as they are today.

 The young shoots of papyrus can be peeled and steamed, but
papyrus was much more useful for paper. Other plants that were
familiar to Egyptians were sedge (a kind of small starchy tuber),
lotus, and water lily.

 The spices that were common to Egyptians include cumin, anise,
coriander, fenugreek, mustard, and juniper. All were used in cuisine,
medicine, and mummification. In addition, garlic and onions
were very important; they were apparently fed to slaves building
the pyramids.

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Lecture 3: Egypt and the Gift of the Nile  Many fruits—including figs, date palm, apples, plums, carob, and
pomegranate—were cultivated. Peaches, cherries, pears, and other
grafted trees came in Greco-Roman times. Olive oil was for the
most part imported, but in late dynastic Egypt, it was also grown
to a certain extent. Sesame oil and sesame paste (tahini) was also
important for cooking from about the 3rd century B.C.

 The Egyptians mostly used animal fats for cooking. Some nuts
and radish or lettuce seeds were pressed into oil. However, there
is no concrete evidence for frying foods. They didn’t have cheese
or butter, but they did use milk. In addition, salt and natron (which
was especially used for mummifying) were very important.

Suggested Reading

Darby, Food.

Mehdawy, The Pharaoh’s Kitchen.

Rivera, The Pharaoh’s Feast.

Culinary Activity

Egyptian Beer
Sophisticated archaeological techniques that have been developed in the
past few decades have allowed researchers not only to identify vessels that
stored beer in ancient times, but they also can identify exact ingredients as
well. Patrick McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania is the best-known
biomolecular archaeologist of ancient drinks, and he has even worked with
breweries to develop modern versions. Although they taste quite good, they
use modern strains of yeast and brewing protocols that are very different
from ancient practice. These are the dictates of modern regulations and the
demands of commerce—but at home, you can brew exactly as the ancients
did, using wild yeast and simple pottery vessels. Be prepared, though, it will
not taste like your standard fizzy lager.

First, you will need barley, which must be whole, fresh, and not pearled,
which kills the seed. You are going to germinate the grains by sprinkling on

26

some water, leaving it in a sunny spot, and waiting until they just begin to
sprout. Turn them around every now and then, drain off the liquid, and replace
it if it begins to smell a bit. They should stay moist during germination. This
should only take a few days. Once you see them sprout, dry them off, and
place them in the sun to dry completely. If you want a darker brew, toast a
few of the grains gently and add to the rest. Then, break everything up in a
large mortar. You want small pieces, but not powder.
Next, heat the grain in water at about 140 degrees, and maintain that
temperature for an hour. Strain this into another pot, and pour some more hot
water over just to release the last bit of sugars in the mash. Now is the fun
part. Cover the pot with a cheesecloth, and let it ferment at room temperature.
Wild yeasts will invade, and it will start to bubble in a few days. Taste it
periodically; it will probably be a little sour, thick, and of course still room
temperature. That’s ancient beer—fairly low in alcohol but refreshing. If you
insist, strain it again, funnel into bottles, and refrigerate.

27

Lecture 4: Ancient Judea—From Eden to Kosher Laws Ancient Judea—From Eden to Kosher Laws

Lecture 4

More than any other civilization, the ancient Hebrews defined
their relationship to God in terms of what they ate, what was
considered clean and unclean, and what they sacrificed to their
God. The succession of different dietary codes given to the Hebrews through
their history in a certain metaphorical/mythological sense replicates actual
dietary changes experienced by humans. That is, the Old Testament is a good
source of history—not literal history, but stories recounted in Genesis reflect
real historical events as interpreted over generations. In this lecture, you will
learn about those stories in light of their relevance to food history.

Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel
 A myth is a story that explains to people why things are the way
they are. It can explain natural phenomenon or social practices. It
explains why people do what they do—why they are different from
other people—and it also gets them to behave. More than anything,
it justifies the status quo.

 In the beginning, God created the Earth. He created seed-bearing
plants and fruit trees. Then, he made animals and, finally, Adam,
who is given stewardship over the animals and gets to name them.
Animals are not intended as food; instead, Adam and Eve eat seeds
and fruits. They are not exactly vegetarians, but fruitarians. They
don’t kill anything—not even plants. They are in a state of complete
and utter innocence, totally guilt-free.

 This part of the story reminds the Hebrews that according to God’s
original plan, all killing was wrong, and in a sense, it still is and
always will be. If this a mythological version of real events, what
would Eden be—that time when hominids ate vegetables?

 Significantly, the hunting and gathering stage of human history has
been edited out, or at least the myth ignores what the Hebrews all

28

probably knew: that their ancestors hunted. The story needed a fall
from perfection; it had to show that evil is the fault of humans and
not in God’s original plan. Evil comes from our disobedience.

 The fall is an act of eating: Eve eats the fruit, which may have
been a pomegranate because they probably didn’t have apples in
ancient Judea. Eves gives the fruit to Adam, and he eats it, too. As
a consequence of eating the fruit, Adam and Eve are kicked out
of Eden, and their punishment is labor. In other words, they have
experienced the agricultural revolution; they have gone from being
leisured, innocent gatherers to agriculturalists.

 For the Hebrews, this story is a way to explain, justify, and reinforce
the settled way of life. It would be very dangerous to the survival of
this society if men wandered off into the brush. This keeps them at
home and teaches them their duty. It also explains to them why their
neighbors are sometimes not nice to them. There exists evil now,
and it’s our fault. Don’t blame God if something rotten happens.

 Adam and Eve’s children, Cain and Abel, are a farmer and a
shepherd, respectively. Abel brings God some fat as an offering, and
Cain brings some produce of the soil—which, for some reason, God
rejects. This tells the Hebrews that you can’t bribe God. Sometimes
he favors what you do and sometimes not, but ultimately, what he
does is inscrutable to us lowly mortals.

 Humans mess up again. Cain kills Abel. Significantly, Cain’s
punishment is that the ground will not produce food for him
anymore, and he is made to wander the Earth and he is given a
strange mark so that people stay away from him and don’t kill him.
He’s a nomadic shepherd—someone different from the Hebrews,
who are settled agriculturalists. This explains why Hebrews are
different from those around them and why they have to keep apart
from them.

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Lecture 4: Ancient Judea—From Eden to Kosher Laws The Great Flood and Noah’s Ark
 There is a cataclysmic flood. Everyone and everything drowns—
except for Noah. When it’s all over, Noah takes some ritually clean
beasts and birds and burns them whole on the altar, and the Lord
smelled the soothing odor. Above everything, God wants justice,
and killing, no matter who does it, demands punishment.

 To right things in the universe, someone or something has to be
punished whenever someone or something is killed. God doesn’t
really care who is punished, strangely enough, so when you do
something wrong, you can substitute a goat—a scapegoat—who is
sacrificed in place of you.

 What’s odd is that God hasn’t explained this whole system of justice
yet, and presumably, it’s later Hebrews putting this sacrifice in the
story to show that Noah is pious and good. However, it doesn’t
really make sense yet.

 God also changes the human diet. Humans can’t be expected to live
as vegetarians anymore because they’re killers, so God lets them
kill animals and eat meat. This is an admission by God that humans
are faulty.

 As a way to enforce justice in the universe, God states that murder
of all kinds is forbidden: If you kill a man, then someone must be
punished with death, and if you kill an animal, then God wants
satisfaction in the form of sacrifice.

 There’s actually only one dietary restriction at this stage: Humans
can’t eat blood. It seems that the Hebrews thought that blood
contained the “life” of the creature, and all life belongs to God. The
blood prohibition is still in effect among Jews; animals have to be
slaughtered painlessly and the blood completely drained to be kosher.

Moses and the Seder Plate
 Israelites are enslaved in Egypt, and Moses is trying to get them
set free. The last of the nasty plagues is that the first-born son of

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© iStockphoto/Thinkstock.

Matzo, unleavened bread, is eaten by Jews during Passover, or Pesach.

every household would die, and the way Moses signals to the angel
of death to avoid the Hebrew households is by having them smear
blood on the doors.

 It’s from this episode that one of the central food rituals in Judaism
is first enacted—what we call Passover, or in Hebrew, the Seder.
The Hebrews are told to do all sorts of unusual things on that day
(and for seven days) and eat odd foods. They can’t eat leavened
bread (only matzo), supposedly to remember having to escape
quickly before the bread had time to rise in the morning. All of the
things on the Seder plate are meant to remind the participants of
some affliction or another.

 The Hebrews escape from Egypt, and they have to wander through
the desert. They’re fed manna, which some people say is a sticky
excretion of bugs left on trees, not unlike honey. However, the
Israelites long for the fish, cucumbers, and garlic they ate in Egypt.
Finally, they get nearer to the promised land. Moses goes up

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Lecture 4: Ancient Judea—From Eden to Kosher Laws Mount Sinai and is given the law. This is a whole new epoch in
dietary history and, in fact, a new relationship between God and
the Israelites.

Food Prohibitions and Practices
 According to God, Hebrews can eat anything with a cloven hoof
and that chews its cud—which means ruminants like goats, sheep,
and cows—but not animals that have only one or the other, like the
camel that chews its cud but has toes, nor the pig that has cloven
hooves but doesn’t chew its cud.

 There has been more debate over this question than probably any
other food taboo in history. It was once suggested that the Hebrews
avoided pork because they somehow knew about trichinosis,
so they forbid pigs, which are filthy anyway. In fact, they knew
nothing about trichinosis, which is killed by cooking, and other
animals carry other diseases, such as salmonella or anthrax.

 Other historians have suggested that the Hebrews made the
prohibition so that they could be kept separate from their neighbors,
who ate pigs. However, many of the other Semitic people living
around the Hebrews also avoided pork.

 Jean Soler explains food prohibitions as a problem of
categorization. Soler argues that it’s still a matter of murder: The
only animals allowed to be eaten are vegetarians—ones whose sins
don’t have to be expiated. Carnivores and omnivores, who will
commit murder, are ritually unclean, so they can’t be eaten. A few
animals got prohibited by mistake, such as hares, or because priests
determined that they were unclean, such as snails, shellfish, and fish
without scales.

 The prohibition of boiling a kid in its mother’s milk is a culinary
form of putting together two things that don’t belong together—a
kind of culinary adultery. Among people who keep kosher, it has
come to be interpreted as meaning that you can never mix any milk
and meat products in the same meal.

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 Fasting is another food practice that is first set down in Leviticus,
and it’s one that has enormous importance to Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam. In the case of the Hebrews, it’s for the Day of Atonement,
Yom Kippur—a day when people are not supposed to work or have
fun. They just sit around and think about all the bad things they’ve
done and promise not to do them in the coming year. It’s the most
sacred holiday in the Jewish calendar.

 The other thing instituted is the Sabbath. The Bible claims that
the Sabbath has roots going all the way back to the creation—to
God’s resting on the seventh day. It’s explicitly commanded that
you aren’t allowed to work on the Sabbath. Leviticus also institutes
tithes—1/10 of all produce—to support the priests, a practice that
survives in Christianity, too.

 Hanukkah commemorates an episode during the Greek occupation,
when the Maccabees held an uprising. The significance of the eight
days of Hanukkah is that the temple oil miraculously lasted eight
days during a siege. Hanukkah has its own food rituals, particularly
frying in oil.

 Around the time of Jesus, there was intense political turmoil. After
the Romans dispersed the Jews during the Diaspora, the ritual
sacrifices in the temple ceased. Among Jews, worship was now
in synagogues—sort of Greek-influenced schools, more places of
learning than holy temples. It’s also then that the home rituals that
focus so much on food take on much greater importance.

Suggested Reading

Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied.

Douglas, Purity and Danger.

Greenspoon, Food and Judaism.

Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches.

Simoons, Eat Not This Flesh.

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Lecture 4: Ancient Judea—From Eden to Kosher Laws Culinary Activity

Passover Seder
Passover, or Pesach, is the most ritualized meal in the Jewish faith. Readings
from the book of Exodus dominate, along with Talmudic commentary, but
certain foods are also part of the liturgy. Matzo, or unleavened bread, is
absolutely essential and replaces risen bread entirely for the entire seven-
or eight-day festival. The Seder is the traditional meal, during which four
glasses of wine are consumed; people eat reclining, dip bitter herbs in salt
water, and eat only unleavened bread. These peculiarities are recorded in
the “Four Questions,” which are sung or read by the youngest member of
the family. The exact order of the Seder is prescribed in the Haggadah, a
small book used through the service. Apart from foods that are eaten merely
traditionally, such as matzo ball soup or gefilte fish, a Seder plate contains
these ritually prescribed foods, each of which commemorates the story of
being freed from bondage in Egypt. The maror are bitter herbs, such as
horseradish; charoset is a thick paste of fruits and nuts to recall the mortar
used by slaves; karpas is another vegetable, usually parsley dipped into salt
water to commemorate tears; z’roa is a roasted lamb bone commemorating
ritual sacrifice in the Temple; and beitzah is a roasted egg, a symbol of
mourning. If you are lucky enough to be invited to a Passover dinner, this
may help to make sense of the ritual. Otherwise, try making your own
gefilte fish. The stuff that is sold in jars is pretty vile, so it’s worth making
it yourself.

Gefilte Fish
Use freshwater white fish, such as pike or carp—but any white fish will do.
Remove the fillets, and save the bones and heads. Discard innards and gills
if the fish hasn’t been cleaned. Put the bones and head into a pot, cover with
water, and add chopped carrot, celery, onion, fresh dill and parsley, and a
little salt. Simmer gently for 30 minutes and strain, pressing on solids. Return
strained liquid to the pot. This is your poaching liquid, or court bouillon.

Next, pound or process the fillets into a fine paste. Add a little salt and matzo
meal as a binder and an egg. With two spoons, form large torpedo shapes,
or quenelles, and drop gently into the simmering poaching liquid. Repeat
until all of the fish is used, removing the fish quenelles after about five to

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seven minutes, when they should be light, fluffy, and cooked through. Next,
return all of your quenelles to the cooled poaching liquid, and put them into
the refrigerator for at least several hours, until they are completely cold.
Serve cold with freshly grated horseradish on the side and a sprig of dill.
Aficionados will also want some of the jelled poaching liquid; if you’ve used
enough bones, it will have congealed.

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Lecture 5: Classical Greece—Wine, Olive Oil, and Trade Classical Greece—Wine, Olive Oil, and Trade

Lecture 5

In this lecture, you will learn that the food culture of ancient Greece
is largely the result of its unique geography. Greece is an extremely
mountainous appendage hanging off the end of Europe and dipping
into the Mediterranean. Easy access to the sea means a lot of fish, but they
don’t have a lot of arable farmland, which means that with any sizeable
population, the Greeks have difficulty providing grain. They have to seek
out flat plains elsewhere and colonize them. This is key to understanding
why Athens became a mercantile state and why wealth was distributed fairly
evenly through the population.

The Geography of Greece
 Being a society heavily dependent on trade, it’s not surprising that
the Greeks invented money. The Lydians were first after about 625
B.C., but most city-states coined their own money soon thereafter—
and money clearly fosters trade. All of the new colonies that the
Greeks set up were allowed to figure out how to govern themselves.
There’s a great deal of political experimentation. Like the United
States, they started with a relatively clean slate.

 Most of the colonies keep in close contact with the mother cities,
even if they become politically independent, so they remain closely
tied into Greece’s economy, supplying some products and serving
as a market for others—especially manufactured goods like pottery.

 What Greece can grow, if not huge quantities of grain, are plants
that are better suited to hillsides, such as olives, grape vines, and
fruit trees. They experience long, hot summers and wet winters ideal
for these crops. These, apart from providing food for the people,
are excellent articles of trade. They can be preserved and stored
in amphorae, and olive oil and wine can be shipped anywhere. In
addition, Mount Hymettus, covered in wild thyme, still makes some
of the best honey in the world.

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 Trade makes some private citizens very rich—something we
haven’t really encountered elsewhere. Vibrant Greek culture is also
the product of wealth being spread out among a good percentage of
the population. It’s for very good reason that the Greeks produced
the very first cookbook, by Archestratus. Many people were
interested in gastronomy.

 Because all the parts of Greece are relatively isolated, it will be
very hard to unite the whole peninsula under one ruler, so Greece
will be politically fragmented (unlike Egypt). There is no single all-
powerful ruler; rather, there are lots of little city-states, each with its
own form of government.

 As a result, there won’t be a grand court culture radically separate
from the food of the masses. In fact, most people ate relatively
simple foods—the stereotypical Mediterranean diet of bread, wine,
olives, cheese, some vegetables, and a bit of meat.

 The geographical dispersion also meant that although it’s relatively
easy to invade one part of Greece, it’s nearly impossible to hold
onto anything or engulf it in an empire, as the Persians tried to do.

Archaic Greece
 The earliest record of Greek food habits is the description of what
Greek kings of the heroic age ate as described by Homer in the Iliad
and Odyssey, which were written in about 800 B.C. but describe a
Mycenaean culture that existed a few centuries before.

 We also have many clues about early food culture in Greece from an
author writing shortly after Homer, Hesiod, whose Works and Days
tells about ordinary people’s lives. What is really fascinating about
Hesiod is that many of his stories parallel the biblical ones. Just as
in the Bible, there is a procession of different historical epochs.

 Hesiod’s Works and Days also gives a full picture of what the
average Greek farmer had to do day in and out and season to

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Lecture 5: Classical Greece—Wine, Olive Oil, and Trade season: bring in the wine grapes, fatten the lambs, and knead the
bread dough. The food is simple, fairly monotonous, and basic.

 Another feature of ancient Greek culture, from this early time
through classical times, is the public festival. These were organized
by the state and were basically a way to distribute meat to the
populace—a big communal barbecue, but also a sacrifice.

 There were a lot of different cults in Greece; different cities had
different protector gods, such as Athena for Athens. There were also
many different kinds of worship, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries,
which has to do with the cult of Demeter and the sprouting and
rebirth of grain in the spring. This cult also involves hallucinogenic
drugs like opium and some odd eating rituals.

 Another figure of archaic Greece is Pythagoras, who is sort of the
counterculture guru of this era. Even though we have no writings by
him, he was renowned for starting a sort of philosophical commune
in southern Italy, and he’s the first person in the West to espouse
vegetarianism. He is famous for his Pythagorean theorem, which is
very important to mathematics.

Classical Greece
 In classical Greece (about 490 to 330 B.C.), the most interesting
food custom is the symposium, which was usually a time set aside
for after the main meal of the day (deipnon) in the evening, when
men laid around on couches drinking and discussing things.

 Unlike Plato’s symposium, a true symposium involved performers,
naked flute girls, and people telling dirty stories. Most importantly,
they drink a lot of wine. Greeks mixed their wine with water,
probably because it was fairly thick, sweet, and highly alcoholic.

 Plato merely appropriated this drinking-party form to present
a discussion. His particular brand of rationalism was meant to
counteract the wild, irrational rituals of the early Greeks. In fact,

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Plato has a certain attitude toward food that influences Western
thought even in present times.

 Plato thought that things of this world, material objects, were less
real and important than things that exist in the world of ideal forms.
In other words, if you are thinking about chairs, a concrete object
is a chair, and so are all the others, and they’re all a little different,
so none can be the absolutely true chair—or the concept of “chair”
that’s equally applicable to all chairs at all times. However, you can
think of the ideal form of “chair,” of which these are only inferior
reflections.

 If ideas are purer than objects, then activities that involve thought
are more highly valued than physical and manual activities. In
Phaedo, Plato expressed the idea that being a philosopher or poet is
more noble and worthwhile than being a builder or chef. Pleasures
of the body are distracting and demeaning, and just as the soul is
more valuable and eternal than the body, intellectual pursuits are
more important than physical pleasures. This attitude, a kind of
secular food guilt, reverberates throughout Western civilization.

 There is another dialogue by Plato, Gorgias, in which he compares
cooking, a menial task that only serves to stimulate the senses, with
medicine, which tells people what to eat and preserves health and
is, thus, the nobler of the two. There certainly were many Greeks
who were intensely interested in gastronomic pleasure, which is
probably why Plato denounced it so fiercely.

 The Greeks produced the very first cookbook. Actually, there were
several, but only a fragment of one of them survives, and it was
written by Archestratus in about 330 B.C. Most of what survives
are the sections on fish. It’s written in verse, so it was probably
meant to be read aloud at a symposium.

 Archestratus is a connoisseur. He knows where the best fish comes
from and has the ability to get it in the proper season. He knows
how to prepare food without disguising its natural flavor and

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texture. His cooking is light and elegant, presumably intended to
counteract what must have been before him—a cuisine based on
abundance and variety. This cooking is more refined because it
takes discernment and knowledge, not just a lot of money.

What Did Ordinary Greeks Eat?
 Hunting is no longer important. The main species that are
domesticated are sheep, pigs, and goats. Sheep and goats were
mainly used for dairy, but
young kids and lambs were
eaten and were considered a
seasonal delicacy. Pork is the
most commonly eaten meat.
In general, beef is very rare.
All of these animals could be
sacrificial victims.

 Greeks did eat wild hare and
also puppies. Sometimes,
they ate wild ass. They also
ate lots of snails, even though
physicians thought that they
were dangerous. Wild birds
were also part of Greek cuisine.

 Greeks domesticated chickens, Olive oil is a natural fat that has
geese, and quails. Eggs were been used by humans for ages.
very important in Greek cuisine.
They didn’t use butter, which doesn’t keep in hot weather, or drink
fresh milk, which they associated with wild barbarians. However,
they did eat a kind of yogurt that was later called oxygala. Cheese
is very important. Greeks usually ate fresh goat or sheep cheeses,
which were sometimes brined to preserve them.

 Fish are also extremely important—from huge tuna, sturgeon,
sharks, bluefish, mullet, and pike to tiny anchovies. Shellfish, too,
abound in the Aegean Sea, including octopus and squid, oysters,

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Lecture 5: Classical Greece—Wine, Olive Oil, and Trade
© Ingram Publishing/Thinkstock.

crabs and shrimp, and sea anemone. Few important cities are very
far from the water. Greeks also invented a fish sauce, which will be
important in Roman times.

 In terms of fruit, olives and grapes were the most important.
Domesticated fruits include apples and quinces, plums, sour
cherries, watermelon, and cucumbers. All of these were served with
meals, but sweet fruits and nuts—such as figs, pears, pomegranate,
myrtle berries, and mulberries—were also served after a meal. Dates
were well known but were imported. Raisins were also important.
Almonds were the most popular type of nut, but the Greeks also ate
walnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, and pine nuts.

 The Greeks also enjoyed a lot of vegetables, including lettuce
and cabbages, beets, asparagus, cardoons (which later become
artichokes), celery, onions, garlic, and hyacinth bulbs. They ate
tons of wild herbs, including oregano, thyme, basil, mint, coriander,
cumin, and wormwood. Sesame seeds were an important garnish
along with poppy. The Greeks ate legumes, such as peas, lentils,
and chickpeas. Grains like barley were important alongside wheat.
The Greeks baked bread and cakes.

Suggested Reading

Archestratus, The Life of Luxury.

Dalby, Siren Feasts.

Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes.

Culinary Activity

Archestratus’s Shark Recipe
Archestratus, who lived in about 330 B.C. near the Greek colony of Gela in
Sicily, was renowned for his knowledge of where the best ingredients came
from throughout the Greek world. He was a connoisseur, in both ancient and
modern senses. Most of the surviving fragments from his cookbook are about
fish. He doesn’t offer recipes per se, but, rather, gastronomic commentary

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Lecture 5: Classical Greece—Wine, Olive Oil, and Trade about foods and how to prepare them. The following is a reconstructed recipe
based on his commentary about karcharia, probably a kind of small shark.
From Archestratus’s The Life of Luxury, translated by John Wilkins
and Shaun Hill, p. 59–60
Take two shark steaks and place them in a ceramic casserole with a handful
of basil leaves, sprinkle them with ground cumin and salt, and drizzle
on a generous amount of olive oil. Bake these in a 350-degree oven for
40 minutes. Serve topped with a dollop of “pounded sauce,” which is an
ancestor of pesto. Make the sauce by taking a handful of basil, a small garlic
clove, a drizzle of olive oil, and a pinch of salt, and pound in a mortar until
smooth and fine. Serve on top of the shark steak. Because the description
only says to use “fragrant leaves,” feel free to substitute another herb such
as parsley or sage, but because basil comes from the Greek word basileus,
meaning “king,” it seems appropriate. If you are so inclined, eat this with
your fingers while reclining on a couch. Serve with a fragrant retsina, a white
wine flavored with mastic resin.

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